Backpedaling, then Breaking.
How to keep from getting stuck in the past, back when you were cool and good at things.
Hi there! Welcome to this post. This is the third(!!!) weekly featuring a recorded reading of the text by yours truly. I’ll be including the recording for all readers for the next week or so, and after July 15th they will be put behind paywall and available only to paid subscribers.
Your financial support allows me to put more time and energy towards this work and my development as a writer, and I appreciate it more than my words will ever be able to articulate. Either way, I’m just happy you’re here; thank you so much for reading!
Listen Here!
I’m excited to offer this feature as a new addition to my weekly posts. This audio was read, recorded, and produced1 by yours truly. Enjoy!
It took me a while to understand what I had in me to share with you all for the weekly post. I’ve been pretty frustrated with myself recently when it comes to my writing. Something these past few weeks has felt a little stickier, a little more stiffled, a little less exciting than it felt when I first started launching into these weekly posts. The newness of this newsletter is starting to wear off and I’m looking down the long tunnel of the editorial calendar I have set up on my Notion site2 and I’m wondering what the hell I’m going to write about for the next 26 Thursdays of this year and how could anyone not possibly be exhausted by me at that point and how do I keep everyone from being exhausted by me at that point and what even is a process blog and how can my process reflection possibly take up this much time?!?
Often, when I get to the interabang portion of my downward spiraling reflections on the existential nature of my creativity, I open an older post and I read through it all the way, out loud, to myself.3 Even though I only started this substack earlier this year, the months that have passed have proven to be enough time that the words I look back on feel as though they were written by someone else. Someone, I’m happy to report, whose voice I generally enjoy and in whose reflections I do find merit. Reading and listening to the words and thoughts I was able to generate even in the recent past is a strong motivator for me to remember that my voice is one worth sharing and worth listening to, a key aspect of my ongoing impostor syndrome on this platform that I’ve written about many times before. But this post isn’t about the impostor syndrome, or about justifying my words to you (you’re here! clearly I don’t need to make the argument to you about why you should be!).
Instead, today, I’m writing to you about one of the worst habits I have as a writer, and one I engage in far too often. I’ve hinted at it above, and I’m wondering which one of you will have caught onto it by now.
Forgetting to Move
Whenever I feel overwhelmed by writer’s block or impostor syndrome or whatever label I feel best pathologizes the particular sensation of I-just-cannot-bear-to-write-another-word of the day, my first move is to read back on my words from the past. I told you that. But I failed to mention that as much as this can be a balm for my seldom inherently validated writer’s mind, it is just as easily a poison for the version of me who needs to make something in that same worthwhile voice in the now — like, right now. I will spend hours reading through old posts, beginning with Substack, and moving to Tumblr, Facebook, into my Google Drive and my computer’s hard drive, and I’ll wander all the way to old emails or journals I have stashed away, just cycling through old ideas I never fleshed out fully enough or reminders of versions of myself I’ve shed long ago.
When I hear writers say they never reread anything after publishing, it honestly makes me a little anxious. I believe, if we write as we say we do — to know ourselves better and to better share that better known self with others — then we need to be in the practice of acquainting our present self with our past self. Sure, if you spend years on a story and you’ve torn it to shreds only to build it back up again and have it rejected 15 times and then finally get it published somewhere, I can see why you might want to take a break from that story, at least for a time. But five, ten years down the line, I think the willingness to return to that story, and the young person who wrote it in order to spend time with it and find value in it and remember that this, too, is part of who you are now is an essential part of loving yourself as an artist.
That said, I do think it is possible to get a little too lost in the sauce, a little too reverant with yourself and your work that the review can become an excuse for not producing more. I tell myself that I do this because I want to stay connected to the integrity and uniqueness of my own voice, that my past will become my present and that the best way to keep in touch with what I’m trying to do here in the first place is to remember what got me here at all etc. etc. etc., but I also do this because it is a great waste of time that feels very productive. I’ve written about this before, in a few different contexts which all generally result in the same pattern of feeling panic at the sight of a blank page (a phrase which I’ve used so often that I now can’t help but roll my own eyes at myself when I see it typed out) and desperately digging for any excuse to avoid confronting it. This particular excuse, diving into my past as a writer and examining that voice, trying to figure out why I don’t recognize her and what I can do to connect myself with her, feels really good on its face.
I think this is a much smaller scale of how people who produce one hit wonders feel. In that instance, you’re bombarded with the coolest thing you’ve ever done; everywhere you look, there you are, and everyone is so happy about it and so excited about it and they just want to celebrate you and talk to you about how cool that one thing you did was. And then eventually, they are tired of hearing it, or reading it, or seeing it, and they look to you for more, but you’ve spent so much time celebrating this really cool thing you did that took, like, a lot of time. And now your momentum is gone. And also, thinking about how much time and energy it took to make that first really cool thing makes you exhausted before you even lift a finger. So instead, you commit to the idea that it is important to return to your work to remember, to treat it with reverence, to maintain consistency in quality and philosophy and so you need to spend more time thinking about the really cool thing. And in this whole process, you forget to move forward entirely. You never look at that blank page with any need to make something new, because look at what you’ve already done!
Getting the Ball Rolling
Honestly, I don’t know much about keeping my momentum going; this is the longest I’ve committed consistently to a public-facing project like this, and also the longest I’ve committed to writing for myself outside of a public-facing project like this. It’s awesome to me that I’ve gotten this far, and also I’m really scared about getting myself to go further. I have a lot of anxieties about being able to come up with something worthwhile to say every week. And while I know I have the comfort of remembering that there are things I have written in the past that prove I’m worth my salt here, I do struggle with getting past the point of reminding myself of that worth.
Lately I’ve been opening a blank page on Notion for myself and just letting the thoughts flow, eventually transferring them into something more structured that I can offer you all. This works for me, but I’ve noticed that these streams of consciousness lead, time and time again, to these similar fixations on not feeling like I’m experienced or knowledgable enough to write something like this and what it means to release my inhabitions4 and just let the words happen. So, I think what I’m doing here is asking you for help.
When you need to get the ball rolling on a new project or story, where do you start? What does that motivation-gathering process look like for you? How do you keep yourself from focusing intently on the past and what you’ve already done in favor of plunging forward into the future? Are you afraid? Aren’t we all? Does that matter?
REMINDER: Monthly Memoir Book Club!
FREE Monthly Memoir Book Club has kicked off and is in full swing! We’ll be discussing Stephen King’s On Writing. It’s a foundational craft tool and sample text for many entering this genre, and I’m looking forward to rereading it with a new perspective since the last time I picked it up when I was right out of undergrad.
I’m going to launch a discussion post next week(!!!)5 for some digital conversing opportunity, and I’ll be publishing a review/reflection essay on the book that week, as well. I hope you’ll consider reading along to join the fun!
Oh, Also!
Here are links to some things I want to share with you this week:
This short story by Jhumpa Lahiri has maintained a full grip on my background thoughts this week. Something about European summers and acquainted strangers…
- kicked off with their inaugural edition this week! An extremely interesting reflection connecting very well with Claire Dederer’s Monsters, referenced in last week’s post.
July thunderstorms and Janelle Monae’s Age of Pleasure are my two favorite ear candies right now.
The most adorable and calming thing you’ll stare at in your browser this week.
Low budget, high love!
This is absolutely how I got the idea to do the recorded versions of these posts btw.
FEEL THE RAIN ON YOUR SKIN
One of my latest distraction projects has been looking up articles and reviews in writing this post and it has already been so fun, I can’t wait to share this with you!
Love this! In starting a new story, I follow my curiosity into research and see what that sparks. I’m also aware that research, being my happy place, is also where I can procrastinate instead of writing. I totally hear you on reading past posts for a bit of reassurance and/or validation. 😊
This is so unbelievably well written that I can’t understand how you can doubt yourself!
I know the feeling you’ve described so artfully here. For me, there’s a phrase that I read once “Write where the heat is.” Quite often I’ll have plans for what I’ll write about but the idea seems so boring that I can’t actually bring myself to do. Instead I’ve learned to just go wherever I’m most excited to go.
Normally gets me over the inspiration hump.